The Author and His Doppelgangers
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Sincronía ISSN: 1562-384X [email protected] Universidad de Guadalajara México The author and his doppelgangers. Debnár, Marek The author and his doppelgangers. Sincronía, no. 69, 2016 Universidad de Guadalajara, México Available in: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=513852378012 This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. PDF generated from XML JATS4R by Redalyc Project academic non-profit, developed under the open access initiative Filosofía e author and his doppelgangers. Marek Debnár * [email protected] Constantine the Philospher University in Nitra, Eslovaquia Abstract: e paper deals with two understandings of the term “author”: theoretical and biographical. As it will be shown with reference to Roland Barthes’s metaphore “death-of-the-author”, which strongly influenced discussions of the poetics to come, a common belief that both understandings relate to literary oeuvre appears to be false. Barthes’s “death-of-the author” will then be related to Michel Foucault thoughts on disappearing subject. In a literary work, writing represents a space where identity of writer dissolves and, at the same time, that very space enables creation of a new, fictional “I”. is transition to fiction is dealt with in the conclusion, where also illustrated by the work of Fernando Pessoa. Abstract: e paper deals with two understandings of the term “author”: theoretical and biographical. As it will be shown with reference to Roland Barthes’s metaphore Sincronía, no. 69, 2016 “death-of-the-author”, which strongly influenced discussions of the poetics to come, a common belief that both understandings relate to literary oeuvre appears to be false. Universidad de Guadalajara, México Barthes’s “death-of-the author” will then be related to Michel Foucault thoughts on Received: 08 September 2015 disappearing subject. In a literary work, writing represents a space where identity of Revised: 23 September 2015 writer dissolves and, at the same time, that very space enables creation of a new, fictional Accepted: 02 November 2015 “I”. is transition to fiction is dealt with in the conclusion, where also illustrated by the work of Fernando Pessoa. e concept of author is specific and ambiguous ever since it Redalyc: https://www.redalyc.org/ has been “discovered”. It has been used in psychology, where author’s person serves as articulo.oa?id=513852378012 key to the meaning of art. It has also been used in literary theory, where, initially, it had been given a crucial importance (author as a focal point of textual meaning), later to be deprived of this privilege. At last, the concept of author has been used in philosophy in order to guarantee integrity of a subject (subjectivity being base of all philosophy). While philosophical texts were closely connected to their authors’ legitimacy until the 17th century, the situation has now changed radically. Truth becomes a part of anonymous independent structures, which do not have an author: “Our relationship to modern way of thinking and acting, therefore to ourselves, constantly opens up the opportunities for reflections and dialogues that contribute to the internal modifications in a given rationality” (Gogora: 2009, p. 367). Text’s legitimacy is no longer a matter of text’s origin (the author, as a writing subject), but rather a matter of structures, language and discourse. e concept of author is dynamic. Do we, however, know what an author is? We know that it is used in more than one science. e first possible definition of the author could be, then, an abstract derived from various definitions by various sciences. I will now try to define the author using this encyclopedic method. Such a definition suggests an author, which creates a work of art or a scientific work addressed to recipients. Still, this definition is not complete, due to the fact that the author is a part of the work’s context: author’s personal life, experiences and knowledge are related to what he/she is saying. At the same time, the author is determined by history, society and space, which influences the work as well. From the point of view of literary history, every author can be categorized by means of a certain historical literary group or movement. And yet, every artwork reveals its author’s individuality. Speaking in terms of law, an author can only be a natural person, although not necessarily with legal capacity. In the history of science, we know authors of discoveries, patents or concepts. We could add more and more items to our list of what an author is, but even the most complete list would only tell us that an author is a creator. A creator of what we usually call a work of art. Here, the problems occur. Do we know with certainty, what a work of art is? We only know that it “gives birth” to the author, because there is no author without a oeuvre. It PDF generated from XML JATS4R by Redalyc Project academic non-profit, developed under the open access initiative 144 Marek Debnár. e author and his doppelgangers. seems, then, that nothing is easier than to label certain amount of text with a name. e homogenous function of the author’s name, however, is far from being unproblematic, considering the question “what is a oeuvre”? Is it everything that some writer wrote? Not just completed books, but also book fragments, text sketches, dras, marginal notes, scratched sentences? Shall we count even texts signed with pseudonyms and everything found posthumously amongst work? We can see now that work of art is a controversial entity and that the whole connected to this entity, just as the author’s individuality, are controversial as well. In addition, the work has an autonomous existence, independent from author’s life. Once published, the work no longer expresses opinions, capabilities or thoughts of its author. It gains significance (value) in comparison with other works. A work is considered unique to the extent it does not resemble, understood to the extent it reflects other works. When thinking of a book, Michel Foucault writes poignantly in e Archeology of Knowledge: e frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network (Foucault: 2004, p. 17) Reflecting upon author as a category, we experience that the author disappears. e disappearance is a result of the death of the author. e concept of author’s death is crucial to philosophical and literary research of sixties. Philosophy and literary criticism inspired by linguistics, realized that a usual understanding of literature focuses uncompromisingly on the author, his person, preferences, passions and personal history. As a result, author’s life became a key to his/ hers work, thus creating a crucial category in literary criticism – the category “man – work”. Death of the author, as announced by Barthes, embodies a critique of statements such as: Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his confidence. (Barthes: e Death. web page) When reflecting upon death of the author, Barthes uses modern linguistics: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a subject, not a person, and this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language work, that is, to exhaust it (Barthes: e Death. web page). When there is no person or the person does not speak in the work, we cannot subscribe work’s voice to the author’s person. But Barthes goes even further, stating that the work’s voice originates not from writing, but from reading: […] the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of... the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. (Barthes: e Death. web page). is (as planned) resulted in the critics’ focusing on the process of reading. Let us think, however, how the death of the author influenced the author himself. In his manifest, Barthes states that “writing is a destruction of any voice, any origin. e writing is the very neuter, the diversity, that inclined plane where our subject fades, a black-and-white space, where any kind of identity is gone, including identity of a writing body”. We said that a language knows its speaker, but not its person. Because of that, it is the reader, who holds gathered all paths of which the text is constituted. What gives us right, however, to speak of the writer’s disappearance? It is the very structure of modern literature that gives us an answer. For modern literature, certain duplication is characteristic. e literature leaves narration and starts commenting itself. A modern work, instead of posing questions on its writer’s psychology or person, asks about possibilities, meaning and methods of writing. anks to this self-reference, the literature continues to transcend own limits and becomes a comment on itself. e transition from literary language to self-commentary has two consequences. e first is, that the literature evolves as a net, where all nods are unique and, simultaneously, equally distant from each other.